If you don’t have one, you can select from the “Key Store” drop down where you want the certificate to be stored, and then click the “Generate Certificate” button to generate a new certificate in that store. You can see I already have a couple in the selected key store as I’ve been through this process before, and the selected certificate is highlighted. The Name field is the name for the Column Master Key within your database – you can see I’ve decided to call mine “Wibble”.īeneath that you can select – or create – the certificate to be associated with the Key. Right-click over column master keys and select to create a new one: You can find Always Encrypted Keys under the Security folder for your database. You can actually create all of these through SQL Server Management Studio, in fact the first two items get created in the same step, so let’s run through that process, and we can look at what these items are, and what they get used for in more detail as we go along.Ĭreating the Certificate and the Column Master Key A Column Encryption Key in your database.An Always Encrypted Certificate to store on your application server / client machine.To get up and running with Always Encrypted you need three things: So here we’ll go into a little detail about the keys and certificates involved… It also means I can then usually logically extrapolate to answer any questions that come up. I personally find I understand things best when I am solid on the basics. However, the best way to get into trouble with this technology is by not clearly understanding what is going on.

There’s even a single wizard to guide you through the whole process. Always Encrypted on SQL 2016 is pretty easy to set up.

Mesasqlite asking for encryption key